Cheyenne Roundtree, writing in Rolling Stone, talks about the new book by J. K. Rowling and the interesting premise it features.

Rowling’s new novel The Ink Black Heart — part of her crime thriller series Cormoran Strike and penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith — involves a storyline that appears to mirror Rowling’s public downfall after she continually made statements that have been widely condemned as transphobic.

She says in an interview that the premise matching her life is pure coincidence.

But despite the clear similarities to her own life, Rowling claimed to Graham Norton that it’s all just a big coincidence. “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” she said.

Does she think we are stupid?

I can’t think of anyone who has been murdered for being transphobic online. On the other hand, plenty of TRANS people HAVE gotten murdered because of transphobic celebrities using their platforms to punch down.

Be better, Joanne.

Shawn Blanc on doing less.

You don’t have to take action on every idea. You can make a decision without knowing every last detail and option. It’s okay if you don’t finish every book you start. You don’t have to respond to every email you receive. There’s no need to push every project to the max. Having breathing room — a little bit left over — is perfectly acceptable. In fact… I would argue that it’s preferred.

WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story trailer.

I had no idea the Weird Al Yankovic movie was a parody of biopic movies. I mean, I should have known, but after watching the trailer… My goodness, is this going to be hilarious. It looks amazingly crazy. Rainn Wilson playing Dr. Demento is genius.

It also took several watches to realize that’s Evan Rachel Wood as Madonna.

Seriously, a biopic about an artist that makes parodies that is ALSO a parody? Perfect.

The Medium staff looks back at the first ten years of the platform.

Medium turned 10 this month. A decade ago, we built a place on the internet for stories that aren’t too long or too short, but… that in-between length. Our simple, beautiful publishing tools gave you the freedom to focus on your words, and our platform connected you with other readers, writers, and thinkers. Our goal, from the beginning, was to help you share ideas that matter.

Legal Eagle Devin Stone explains in language that everyone can understand how much trouble Donald Trump is in and what his lawyers are doing wrong.

I have no idea where this all going to end up. I’d like to speculate and say an indictment is in the future, but until it actually happens, I won’t believe it.

Niklas Göke woke up early and then blogged about it. It’s kind of genius.

Mike Rothschild, writing for Lithub, has a deep dive into conspiracy theories and the creation of QAnon.

In the post-Trump world, the QAnon movement split along two parallel tracks. Sometimes they happened to intersect, but many other times they went their own way. Most believers went down one, and a few went down the other. But both are critical to understanding why this movement persisted long after any hope of The Storm’s arrival had passed.

One track was a mainstreaming of Q’s core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon—the drops, the obscure comms”—were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had to speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just conservatism now. The tenuous coalition of MAGA-devoted Q believers and more progressive pandemic truthers that lurched out of Facebook in 2020 had become one unified front in 2021. In countless school board meetings, city council sessions, protests, health freedom conferences, and segments on major right-wing media, the same story was being told, and it was a story that even the most casual Q believer would have no problem embracing.

The other track was much farther on the fringe than even most Trumpists were willing to travel. This was where Michael Protzman and his devoted cultists in Negative48 rode, along with other, even more outwardly racist and ant-Semitic new Q promoters. On this track, Q drops were still gospel and the comms still were being decoded for all their secrets. And there were a lot of secrets. Trump and JFK Jr. spoke in number codes with Prince and Elvis, quantum medical beds and NESARA would deliver permanent health and prosperity to all, and Trump was still actually the president of a devolved military government. Fewer people were in this part of Q’s big tent, but they got a lot of baffled media attention for their bizarre antics—gematria cultists waiting for JFK and drinking industrial bleach out of a communal bowl to fight COVID will get clicks.

You may not want to, but you should read the whole thing.

This video is interesting. Not great. Not amaze-balls. Just interesting. Like a thought experiment.

Great song, though.

Because Sandman is a really expensive show. And for Netflix to release the money to let us make another season we have to perform incredibly well. So yes, we've been the top show in the world for the last two weeks. That still may not be enough. https://t.co/m7VusGL2rW

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) August 21, 2022

Boy, I hope so. There’s a great deal of story to tell.

Charles M. Blow, writing an opinion piece in The New York Times, has an interesting premise: Republicans are a problem. He starts by lamenting Liz Cheney’s primary defeat because she would not bow down to “The Big Lie.”

However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching.

But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.

This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

I’m so happy this man concluded that Republicans don’t want democracy as if this is some new-fangled thing he just figured out.

Republicans want fascism. And nothing will change their minds. Rape allegations, fraud, tax evasion, lying, stealing confidential information, and general mob mentality, are always spun that Republicans are right and everyone else is wrong.

It’s a cult.

Liz Cheney refused to drink the spiked Kool-aid and paid the political price for being right in her convictions (this one time).

Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, has a strong opinion on performance-enhancing drugs and Major League Baseball. He invokes the unholy trinity of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds.

If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.

The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.

Those who want to give Judge the record aren’t particularly interested in honoring him. They’re mostly interested in dishonoring Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, because they think those guys are irredeemable cheaters. Few baseball narratives have lasted longer than the notion that players who tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs — or even people who very likely used but never tested positive, like, uh, Bonds and McGwire and Sosa — should go down in history as monsters.

He’s got a real point about McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. They did not test positive for any substances, and McGwire is the only one who said publicly what he took: androstenedione and HGH, neither of which were banned by baseball when he took them.

The biggest reason this has become a hot-button issue is because San Diego Padre and face of Major League Baseball, Fernando Tatis Jr., has been suspended for 80 games after a drug test found clostebol, a banned substance, in his system. Whatever his reasoning: accidental or intentional, using Clostebol is pretty stupid since it was easily found. Please don’t ask me what Clostebol does… probably very little to make Tatis a better hitter or to help him recover faster. I have no idea.

Personally, when I was younger, I thought it soiled the game to have players caught with PEDs. Today, I could not care less. As Leitch says, the term “PED” is so nebulous it means nothing. Players are definitely getting cortisone shots, and that is definitely steroids, so drawing lines in the sand seems arbitrary.

Overall, he’s absolutely correct in stating the home run record to beat is 73. Anything else is wishful thinking and sits squarely at participation trophy level. Judge hitting more than 61 would be a milestone, but not the record.

Rick Beato is just the best at explaining why particular songs are amazing.

The Wall Street Journal outlined the contents of the boxes the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago on August 8:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list.

The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.

I’m waiting to see how all of this plays out, but if this was anyone else, they’d already be in jail right now.

I mean, why in the hell would he take these documents? To sell them? Did he want a few souvenirs? This is the guy who loves to rip up documents and flush them down the toilet, so what was the reasoning behind keeping them?

I can think of a few reasons, but none of them make any sense:

• Trump took anything he wanted and could not fathom the idea that they aren’t really his documents to have.
• He took the documents because he hoped to sell them to someone or a foreign power like Israel or Russia.
• He wanted them because he thought the contents could be used to exonerate him for all of his misdeeds.
• He really had no clue about any of this, and now he’s trying to play the victim.

Maybe there’s some other more obvious reason that I’m not thinking of that makes a lick of sense. I’m sure this whole point will be discovered sooner or later.

Hoping for sooner.

Few people love movies like Quentin Tarantino loves movies. So, it’s a lot of fun to peruse the list of his favorite 40 films put together by IndieWire and Christian Zilko.

It’s a good list, and I’ve seen several of the films included.

I was a little surprised he did not include Casablanca or Blade Runner. I was not at all surprised he included Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Will Leitch asks the question: Where is Donald Trump going to be in five years?

I find myself fascinated with that central question: Where will Donald Trump be in five years? The range of potential outcomes here as wide a range as any in American history. He could be in prison. He could also be the most powerful man on the planet and one of the most significant figures in world history. He also might just be sitting on a golf course eating cheeseburgers. It is more than a little concerning that the fate of the American experiment may rest on what happens over the next five years to a 76-year-old man from Queens. But it just might.

Olivia Newton-John has sadly passed away. She was one of my childhood crushes. Sad.

What better way to celebrate her life and career than to revisit this absolutely bananas 20 minute medley featuring Olivia, ABBA and Andy Gibb from her 1978 ABC special Olivia!

Richard Goldstein, writing for The New York Times, had this to say about one of the greatest to have ever done it.

Vin Scully, who was celebrated for his mastery of the graceful phrase and his gift for storytelling during the 67 summers he served as the announcer for Dodgers baseball games, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. […]

For all the Dodgers’ marquee players since World War II, Mr. Scully was the enduring face of the franchise. He was a national sports treasure as well, broadcasting for CBS and NBC. He called baseball’s Game of the Week, All-Star Games, the playoffs and more than two dozen World Series. In 2009, the American Sportscasters Association voted him No. 1 on its list of the “Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.” […]

“I regard him, all things considered, as the master of radio and TV,” the sports broadcaster Bob Costas once told The Arizona Republic, recalling listening to Mr. Scully with a transistor radio under his pillow as a youngster in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. “I regard him as the best baseball announcer ever.”

I did not grow up listening to Scully. For me, it was Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. In my opinion, the greatest baseball announcer was Buck. However, I can see a strong argument for Scully.

He was just so good:

Scully called Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run.

“What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South, for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”

“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

Vin Scully called Dodger games for 67 years, from 1950 through 2016. This is how he said goodbye.

Keith Olbermann is back, again, this time with a version of his old MSNBC show “Countdown,” in podcast form. He’s calling it… waitforit… Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann was the first talking-head-who-had-a-show that I watched regularly. It might have been because of his ESPN days, or I just liked how he looked at the news and then explained it in a way that made sense to me. I thought he was funny and an excellent interviewer.

This new podcast is the exact same show I remember every weekday morning. It has become the podcast I turn to at 6 am when I walk the dog. During that morning walk, I can almost finish an episode, and I’m fast-forwarding past the commercials and the dogs section.

Olbermann is quite good in this format. I know he has enough money to last a couple of lifetimes, so he has the time, but it seems like a lot of work to do this every week, let alone every weekday.

He’s way more entertaining than some of the other political-type podcasts I listened to in the past, so he has that going for him.